This article was mentioned in a comment by reader Ted Gold, but I thought I would highlight it just to show that when the rubber meets the road, people recognize that, yes, there are just two sexes. This is from the NYT on Feb. 25th.
Click headline to read, or find the article archived here.
An excerpt:
Women outlive men, by something of a long shot: In the United States, women have a life expectancy of about 80, compared to around 75 for men.
This holds true regardless of where women live, how much money they make and many other factors. It’s even true for most other mammals.
“It’s a very robust phenomenon all over the world, totally conserved in sickness, during famines, during epidemics, even during times of starvation,” said Dr. Dena Dubal, a professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco.
But if there are more than two sexes, why do articles like this one always accept that there are two, and, in this case, put people in one of the two classes to compare their longevity? Why are they leaving out all those other sexes that, according to people like Agustín Fuentes and Steve Novella, actually exist? (They are not supposed to be rare, either!)
The article, which by the way is worth reading, though it does not mention evolution (another possible reason), does not refer to members of any other sex. Why not?
You know the answer: there are almost no people who do not fit the gametic definition of male or female, and those people are not members of other sexes. The failure of some Democrats to sign onto this recognition of the obvious is one reason why my party did poorly in the last election.
And yet so-called progressive Democrats and liberals are simply doubling down, as we will see tomorrow when I give a juicy example of resistance to the sex binary from an actual scientist.
Thanks JC. Looking forward to tomorrow. I wonder who it could be? NDT?
I’m going to take a wild guess and posit that an evolutionary reason for women living longer is that post-child-bearing-age women tended to (and still do) assist in raising other women’s young children, which tended to increase those children’s chances of survival.
Men were much less involved in the immediate care of infants, so there was less evolutionary advantage to men living longer.
Does that make any sense?
There is a life-style factor. I think rates of mortality are highest in the late teens and early 20s, when young men manage to lower the life span average of that sex by doing stupid things. This effect is also true for young bull elephants, apparently.
It’s probably multiple factors.
Another factor might be as follows…what is the reason for senescence in living things in the first place? One hypothesis is that genes that might increase reproductivity and survival could also increase morbidity…but that natural selection would be powerless to stop this as long as those carrying those genes successfully reproduce.
This can be used to explain why men age worse than women, because perhaps there is greater competition for mates among males, exacerbating the effect of these senescent genes in males compared to females.
Males may simply have to allocate more of their resources to building structures to seek out and attract mates, and less to repair and anti-aging.
It’s easy to make up evolutionary reasons for either the actual result or its opposite. Data is needed.
How could this mechanism work with regard to natural selection? Older women seem to take care of M and F children in equal numbers.
I asked Grok to adjust life expectancy for men and women in the United States using CDC data from 2022 since that year is the most recent with comprehensive data. If we simply look at life expectancy from birth, male is 74.8 years and female is 80.2 years. Once you adjust for infant mortality, along with homicides, suicides, drug overdose, and accidents (both workplace and other), then the adjusted life expectancy is 79.1 (males) and 82.3 (females). Still a gap of 3.2 years but closer than the 5.4 from birth.
As with all things AI, take this for what it is worth; I haven’t double checked the data.
There are two additional factors to consider. One is that the life expectancy depends on the year in which one is born. In general, it has increased, mainly due to medicine, hygiene, etc., but can decrease, especially for men, if a war plays a role. The other is that, for a given person, all else being equal, the life expectancy increases the older they get. If one makes it to 70, say, then the life expectancy of people who are 70 is not pulled down by people who died as children etc. Obviously, it can never become negative, but the number of probable remaining years drops pretty quickly once one is a few years past the average.
Phillip, as you get older it’s not your life expectancy that increases but your expected age of death.
expected age of death = current age x + your life expectancy given your age x
At birth, your age x is zero, so expected age of death = your life expectancy. As you age, your life expectancy decreases and your expected age of death increases (in modern societies with low infant mortality).
Period life expectancy (LE) is defined as the average number of years remaining to be lived by persons surviving to age x if those persons would experience, during the rest of their lifetimes, the age-specfic mortality rates (that is, the probability of dying at age 1, at age 2, at age 3, etc.) observed over the reference period (usually the most recent period of length 1 to 3 years).
Realistic life expectancy is the period life expectancy (derived from a life table, which contains all the age-specfic mortality rates) adjusted for the historical trend (if there is any such trend).
Say you are 50 years old. To calculate your period LE (a weighted average, where the weights are the probabilities), we sum up a bunch of products: 1 x the probability that you die in the next year + 2 x the probaility that you survive 1 year and then die in the second year + 3 x the probability that you survive for 2 years and then die in the third year + 4 x the probability that you survive for 3 years and then die in the forth year + 5 x … + the oldest age people in your society have recently attained x the probability that you life to that age and then die)
Yes, of course. What I meant is the following: a group of 50-year-olds might live to be on average, say, 78. But a group of 75-year-olds would, on average, live to be, say, 80. That age is higher because people who have already died (between 50 and 75) are not included.
This is the standard evolutionary explanation. It may even be correct. Of course, it may not be.
The health survival paradox has another interest element between the two sexes where despite one sex dying earlier and also living overall less years in good health on in absolute terms (on average), the general narrative is that we must invest more in the other sex because they live a relatively larger proportion of their lives in ill-health. Also that it’s a topic where progressives tacitly accept the biological drivers and downplay the behavioural or cultural drivers. Uncomfortable discussion points for blank slate proponents advocates or for activists promoting lifting up the worst outcomes in society.
Interestingly, the article does mention « mice with two X chromosomes and testes. », who live longer than XY males. Normally, these mice would be counted as « intersex » or « DSD », by a gamete based definition of sex they would be counted as males, but the article considers them female.
Those mice are a widely used model system, but not DSD mutants or intersex. They have a translocation of the SRY gene from the Y chromosome to one of the autosomes (regular non-sex chromosomes). A mouse with 2 normal X chromosomes plus one copy of that SRY gene develops into a normal male. The wiki page is pretty good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Core_Genotypes_mouse_model
I think that the hidden rationale is that the society should invest more in women because, when women are not oppressed, they decide whether to give birth to the next generation or not.
Reality check: the birthrate in Palestine is one of the highest in the world, and it is one of the worst places in the world as far as women’s rights go. Actually, there is a very strong correlation, in the opposite direction. Only a few societies were strongly feminist without a dropping birthrate, but few if any are left. So what the correlation leads to is the decline of feminism on the whole.
That senior comedian you posted in Hili mentioned this fact and said that is why he is going to transition!!!
You know what’s remarkable about that paper? The normality of it. It’s a completely normal discussion of a very interesting and well-known phenomenon. Makes me nostalgic for the days of yore when people used to talk about sex and biology in a straightforward way.
“Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
A similar phenomenon occurs when talking about how old people are. Everyone uses the date of one’s birth to record their age, right? And, yet, “fetal personhood” advocates should be expected to tack on another 9 months to a person’s age, if they truly believe fertilized eggs are real people.
Yes, to top today’s daily bummer, this — “And yet so-called progressive Democrats and liberals are simply doubling down” — and oh, how I wish they’d just slink away from this catastrophic issue that has cost us so dearly. All they have to do is shut up and talk about urgent real world problems.
+1
Let’s be clear: Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time. There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights.
Joe Biden
Jan 25, 2020
https://x.com/JoeBiden/status/1221135646107955200
The unhinged response to Seth Moulton’s (D-MA) very tame remarks, show how fanatically committed ‘progressives’ are to this issue
Whoever was in control of Biden’s X account, failed his job miserably.
I keep wondering when they will reject the “trans” nomenclature. Of course, one could take a trip across (trans) a spectrum and stop anywhere, but in my limited reading (and even that has been a horrorshow) it seems they are “transing” from SEX-A to SEX-B.
So there is at least one study showing that M-to-F transgenders retain male patterns of criminality and likelihood of committing violent crime (6x more than women) even after taking estrogen and undergoing orchiectomies. Markedly different from real women.
So going back to the title of the article Dr. Coyne cites…has anyone studied the lifespan of M-to-F transgenders? I’m betting that it also follows a male pattern and not a female one.
No one knows yet. Life expectancy at birth is an actuarial concept based on life-table analysis. At birth all you can measure is (“assigned” — /sarc) sex and place of birth which is a proxy for family income. Life expectancy depends heavily on infant and early childhood mortality and almost not at all on medical care consumed during adult life, which is why “life expectancy” remains so much lower in poor African countries. It’s not that nobody lives past 35 but rather so few babies reach adulthood that those who live from there to their 80s don’t contribute enough years of life to make back the years lost through deaths in children. (One reason why CO2 emissions per capita are so low in sub-Saharan Africa is that half the population is under 15. On average, each baby will emit CO2 for only 35 years instead of 75, and half of that before they reach adult consumption patterns.)
It is therefore not meaningful to ask what the life expectancy of a MtF trans person is, even though it’s a great question. You would have had to have so identified at birth the cohort destined to transition someday and tracked its mortality from the moment of birth. It is possible for the actuaries to predict life expectancy at any given age. Life insurance companies use these predictions to set premiums. However the law of large numbers works only for a few well-standardized add-ons like cigarette smoking where the company can charge differential rates. If an applicant has an actual medical condition that raises the risk of dying early, the company will usually deny the insurance outright rather than trying to adjust the premium to capture the higher risk. The secret to buying life insurance on your own life is to buy it early, (when your children are young and will need it most) before you accumulate medical conditions that make your life uninsurable.
The same applies at this stage of knowledge with trans people. They are already “marginalized and oppressed” from being mentally unstable and more likely to be unemployed, drug-addicted, binge-drinkers, homeless, and HIV-positive all of which increase mortality. They are often obese and have high blood pressure and bad cholesterol. Added on are the well-known fatal side effects of cross-sex hormones, both in and of themselves and also in bodies that weren’t designed for those hormones. There is no evidence that estrogen “fixes” whatever it is that causes men to die earlier. Estrogen given to post-menopausal women with coronary risk factors increases cardiovascular complications. Does testosterone ablate the female survival advantage? Don’t know. Will MtFs want to continue their “HRT” on into old age instead of stopping it at or a few years after menopause the way women typically do?
Too few trans people have died yet to be able to say if a cohort of 25-year-old MtFs who take life-long estrogens and anti-androgens will or won’t live as long as a cohort of 25-year-olds who aren’t trans. The cohort just isn’t old enough yet. And ditto for 25-year-old women taking testosterone for life. Few trans people have any need for life insurance but if I was an actuary, I wouldn’t want to take the other side of that bet on a man or a woman taking wrong-sex hormones. I’d just say No.
Again, great question!
Also omitted from the NYT article was any consideration of heterozygosity and sex-linked diseases. The heterogametic sex is more prone to the effects of mutation as it lacks a balancing allele on the paired chromosome. In both mammals (where females are the homogametic sex, XX) and birds (where the homogametic ZZ sex is male), it is the homogametic sex with greater longevity.
Thank you, I just today discussed this with students but didn’t know about the birds.
I suspect that if the data was related to ANY other group, the answer would be proclaimed as obvious without the need for study, and that answer would end with “ism”.
The article serves as an additional data point that only two sexes exist. That is obvious. However, it does not refute the idea (wrong, in my opinion) that sex is a spectrum. Imagine if sex was bimodal (not binary). It would still be quite possible to measure longevity differences and report them. Note that some human characteristics are bimodal. Obviously, Testosterone levels are bimodal. Human height may be bimodal (I don’t know either way).
My guess (and it is just a guess) is that the ‘sex is a spectrum’ notion (nonsense) gains plausibility because some human characteristics really are a spectrum. Obviously, penis size and breast size are variable. Some women are more feminine, than others. Some men are most masculine, than others.